Monday, September 16

Oh Right I Forgot, I Went To Bali Last Week

Hip hop hoorayyyyy!
Hooooo!
I went to Baliiii!
and no one knooooows!

Surprise! I traveled to the other half of the world and somehow kept mostly quiet, two things I have never done before that somehow happened in tandem. It wasn't that I didn't want anyone to know where I was headed or that I was terribly unexcited, but more that I had no idea what I was getting myself into and didn't know how to express it. Fixated on the what-the-what length of travel (19 hours? 14 hours? I spent a night in Taiwan?) paired with a fear of packing all the wrong things, I never quite allowed myself to process that I was going to be spending time in Asia. In ASIA! Which, of course, means that I told absolutely no one until posting an Instagram of cake at a shockingly over-the-top Sunday St. Regis buffet and cluelessly couldn't understand the "Are you at a restaurant called Bali or, like, Bali?!" confusion it was met with.

So, yes, it's true. I went to Bali for a short yet wonderful half-week to attend my boyfriend's friends' endlessly beautiful wedding and eat my way through Indonesian cuisine, the latter of which never happened. My body? Well, it sort of decided to quit me. Long story short, I went to Bali for five days and was sick for a few of them, but hey now, what's a little international travel without wasting away in a canopy and trying to hunt down and pay for acetaminophen with a pocket full of a few hundred thousand rupiah?

The days that I was fully functioning were downright lovely. Scooters speeding through the streets, coconuts served at all the bars, as many water sports as you could possibly dream up — there is way too much to do in two weeks let alone in a few afternoons in Bali, and going back through these photos reminds me we actually did conquer a lot before I became a pasty American vessel of sick. Even still, when I was just a sad sack roaming around in brand new sundresses, the views from our hotel and Potato Head Beach Club — the happiest place on a glamorous globetrotter's earth — were so endlessly relaxing that it almost didn't even matter.

One might say we came for the nuptials but stayed for the primates, though, since our predetermined highlight of the trip — a pit stop at Monkey Forest, a FOREST FILLED WITH MONKEYS — far and away lived up to its co-habitative promise. Just imagine a forest, filled with animals typically thirty feet away and separated by bulletproof glass, out in the open, flopping around and waiting to give you rabies. Ha, ha, I kid, but I'm sure it's happened and it was equal parts exciting and bizarrely petrifying, like a cute cuddly version of on-the-ground sky diving.

We were told that feeding them is bad, even though these were the "tame" monkeys, as there is another jungle where the monkeys will steal your sunglasses, shoes and camera outright and never give it back. But, Instagram photo opportunity trumped common zoological sense, and we couldn't help ourselves (with the help of a forest aide, naturally.) Behold, the first and last time I will have a play date with a critter, unless New York decides to adopt Friends law and allows paleontologists to have banana-scarfing pets:

Cooler than a fall fedora and fuzzier than my winter coat? Looks like it's a good thing I didn't line up outside of Target for a Phillip Lim purse after all.